


Those Who Wait

by mightyscrub



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: M/M, Soulmate AU, background bosselot and bbkaz
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 21:26:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11540742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mightyscrub/pseuds/mightyscrub
Summary: Canon-based soulmate AU.  Ocelot had always known, in his endless practicality, that having a soulmate didn’t necessarily mean you would stay with them in the end, or even that you would love them.(AU where your soulmate's injuries appear on your body and also you know their name...  Metal Gear happens, in addition.)





	Those Who Wait

**Author's Note:**

> I was possessed by demons and somehow churned out a beefy ocelhira fic, go figure.
> 
> I blame #1: Yeoyou, who made me want to write a soulmate AU with her Fantastic Beasts fic: http://archiveofourown.org/works/11527659/chapters/25877013
> 
> I blame #2: Ocelhira twitter, for cursing my dick. I guess this was inevitable, really. Dick status: cursed.
> 
> I took some liberties with kinda the choreography of certain canon scenes for my own effects. Suspend some fan disbelief for me please lol

Bruises were usually Kazuhira’s.

They appeared on Ocelot’s skin, unearned, and he took careful note of each one, calculating their mysteries in between his lessons. It was common knowledge that anyone with a particularly strong link to their destined partner would wear their marks as their own, even sometimes feel their pains. It was common enough to be boring, but Ocelot was an imaginative child.

He had been born with that name whispering somewhere deep in his brain, to the extent that “Kazuhira” was the first word he ever spoke, in perfect Japanese cadence despite the mixed Russian, English, and Chinese of his caretakers.

That name felt more real than “Adamska” ever did. He was a child named after an apex predator, brain stuffed with numbers he didn’t even understand the meaning of except that he could list them on command. He knew how to kill people. In fact, he _had_ killed people. His caretakers had him watch homemade snuff films to desensitize him to such things, and he grew to like the ones he imagined had interesting stories. When he got older this changed into a love of spaghetti westerns and Hollywood. Again, an imaginative child.

The blood never seemed quite real, the same way his own injuries and scars never seemed quite real, despite the pain. Yet Kazuhira’s bruises, blossoming on his cheek in the morning, were stories just as engaging as cowboys. Maybe it was real _because_ it was just a story, the same way “Ocelot” held more truth than “Adamska.” Lies were more appealing sometimes.

Did Kazuhira have a bully? Where was he? Was he alarmed by the meaningful precision of Ocelot’s own scars? Would they ever meet?

These questions became less and less important over the years, but the name remained in his head, a constant quiet hum. Undeserving of attention, but if it disappeared one day perhaps his world would go off-kilter, like the dread of an engine cutting off.

x

Ocelot was twenty years old when he first met Snake, young enough still to get rather over-excited as they grappled in the back of the WIG. He wasn’t one to find much interest in sexual pursuits, at least those that didn’t serve a more practical purpose, but the way Snake’s harsh breaths humidified his collar, the scrape of beard against his own cheek, at the same moment that he could barely catch his own breath in Snake’s hold… He was grinning like a madman by the time he threw Snake off, the heavier man stumbling back against a wall of the aircraft, narrowly missing a premature exit. “Tatyana” shouted something from the pilot’s seat, at the same moment that Ocelot lunged, hands clamping expertly at Snake’s belt.

For his knife of course. Snake shook him away with a grunt before he could get a good hold.

Ocelot was already working against the entire world at this point. Here in the beginning he thoroughly believed he would fail at his impossible goals, die with his plans fizzling out silently and never a hero for it because he was never a hero in the first place. His youth was coated in the nihilism of imminent death. But that also meant he could have all the fun he wanted.

He straightened out of his stance, panting somewhat, and let the sharpness of his smile meet his eyes. He held up his hands, a cocky gesture, but hiding a genuineness that Snake understood. Snake knew that Ocelot wouldn’t attack at this moment. A short truce.

Ocelot spun open his revolvers one at a time with his thumb, showing them empty. Then he took the bullet from his necklace and slid it carefully into a cylinder. He started tossing the guns. Snake watched silently.

Back during his debrief, Ocelot had read in Snake’s admittedly hole-filled file that sections of his family had been interned for their Japanese ancestry in America. The beginnings of a legend… But even more than that, Snake was a dead man walking, just like Ocelot, powerless but following his own motives, and somehow dignified, somehow _succeeding_.

Japanese...

The guns stopped. “I’ve learned some new moves,” Ocelot said. He laid the two revolvers on the floor between him and Snake, and took a step back. Hands up and limp, he smiled, smaller now. More precise. “What do you say?”

Snake responded by stepping forward and making his choice.

He was an honorable man, so it made sense to fight him honorably, yes?

Ocelot took the remaining gun and they turned, back pressing against back, like cowboys off in some dusty American desert.

Step. Step. Step.

One. Two. Three.

Draw.

They turned, guns pointed, eyes meeting. Snake’s expression was calm yet stern.

He didn’t shoot, so Ocelot did instead.

Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click.

A long silence followed, staring at Snake’s impassive face, and then Ocelot straightened once more.

“Your luck’s better than mine again,” he said. “Why didn’t you shoot?”

Snake didn’t answer, simply met Ocelot’s gaze. It wouldn’t have mattered. It was a blank anyway, but the fact that Snake knowing that was just as likely as sentimentality was part of his charm.

Ocelot holstered his gun and stepped forward for the other one, his spurs circling slowly. 

“What’s your name?” he asked into the narrow space between them.

“Snake.”

“No. Not that one. You’re not a snake and I’m not an ocelot.” He laid a gloved red hand on his own chest. “My name is Adamska. What’s yours?”

The barest flicker of a smile crossed Snake’s face. “John.”

Surely this was a lie, something as obvious as John Doe. But Ocelot could read clear as day the lack of recognition in John’s eyes.

This was not Kazuhira.

Ocelot smirked, without bitterness. The exhilaration of the fight was still palpable, the high of aches and pains.

“Plain name. But I won’t forget it.,” he said. It was rare: a promise he intended to keep.

He jumped out of the plane with mad joy and embraced the cold water.

x

With each consecutive success in his mission, Ocelot’s life became more careful, more a tenuous link to every important fragile piece in his network. Waging war against his creators was not a simple task. Of course when he heard tell of Big Boss’ coma, he wanted to see John for himself, see if he could recognize the face of his old friend who shared a name with an unidentified corpse. But that was Zero’s job, moving Big Boss and his former medic out of some crumbling hospital to a more secure position in Cyprus.

Ocelot largely missed that procedure, instead tasked with debriefing another survivor of the crash: someone named Miller, the only person Big Boss’ remaining mercenaries would take orders from.

They met in the first hospital’s backlot, which was crammed with a line of patients curling out the back door. Miller was there for pain medication, something his lackeys were running low on. He stood upright, arms folded, with a bent cigarette in his mouth. You wouldn’t expect he’d been blown up in a helicopter only months before, except for the pinch at the corners of his eyes, which was mostly obscured by the aviators anyway.

His hair was a scraggly nest of dried-up gel. It seemed he was still putting on appearances for the troops, but clinging to it by a thread.

Ocelot came to smoothly stand beside him in the crowd.

“I’m supposed to keep an eye on you,” he drawled, his perfected movie accent in full force.

“Don’t care,” said Miller. “I won’t trust you. If we can use you to protect Big Boss while he recovers that’s a business arrangement, but you won’t be getting more than that.”

“John,” said Ocelot.

“What?”

“You were his right hand man, I’ve heard. Then you must know his name.”

Miller sneered, a bitter thing but it was almost fond. That meant Miller knew the name was fake… and also that John had indeed given it to him.

“So you’re a friend of his.” Miller removed his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, staring down at it with a wistful clench of his jaw.

“I would give him my life,” Ocelot said. It was true, funnily enough.

“Join the club,” said Miller, but he was pleased. He offered a hand. “Kazuhira Miller. You?”

Ocelot was too old to let the surprise show on his face. He simply accepted the handshake, firm and professional.

Suffice to say, he hadn’t expected a blond.

He noticed now the smallest cut under Miller’s left eyebrow, pink and innocuous, soon to heal over, yet also the perfect double of a cut that had appeared on Ocelot earlier that morning as he took careful note of his soulmate’s blemishes of the day in the mirror, the same old ritual.

Miller didn’t seem as observant, or perhaps just uninvested. He paid Ocelot no particular mind. But surely he had always known the name Adamska. A clunky gaijin name, more reason to be ashamed of his own blood.

Ocelot smiled. “Ocelot is the only name you need to know,” he said simply.

Miller gave him a withering look, and pinched the cigarette back between his lips. “Figures,” he scoffed.

Indeed.

x

Ocelot and Miller both had more important things to do, but it was no plot twist that they went to Cyprus first. Miller got some of Zero’s plans but not all of them from Ocelot. He didn’t know the medic was alive just one room over, for example. He thought that friend was dead. Ocelot wasn’t finished sussing out how much Miller needed to know.

Instead the two men sat in foldable chairs on either side of John’s bed. John of course looked terrible, his beard gone rampant in a face blue with bruising and half mummified in tape and gauze. Yet there was a softness in the laxness of his jaw, his repose, that reminded Ocelot of that strangely emotional man he met in Tselinoyarsk and worked with sparsely over the years.

Miller studied John’s face just as intently behind his aviators, although his expression was carefully blank. He’d been watching John’s face ever since they pulled his mangled body from the ocean, through the period everyone thought Big Boss would die, and now as they sat here waiting for a man who might not ever wake up.

It was boring.

They didn’t talk to each other much, but neither of them moved from John’s bedside, except to get a magazine or to piss. It was like they needed to absorb him, or the situation, through the proximity.

Miller was attractive, Ocelot noticed, but as the evening wore on, his mouth grew thinner and his footsteps more forceful. The emotion he’d been hiding so well even from Ocelot’s trained eye was anger.

After the nurses massaged John against bedsores and the sun set to a humid night, when they were simply sitting in a dark room lit by medical machinery and one bend-necked lamp, Miller finally snapped in a big way.

“Dammit!” His fists came down on the side of John’s bed, a muted thwap.

Ocelot dog-eared the page in his magazine and closed it on his knee. He didn’t say anything, just folded his gloved hands over his belly and watched.

Miller was breathing heavily, shoulders up at his ears, then he repeated “DAMMIT” until his voice cracked and he collapsed in on himself, shoving his sunglasses up onto his hair to rub at his eyes.

Ocelot waited. Miller’s hand fell (a smaller thwap), and for the first time Ocelot clearly saw his eyes, gray blue and tired. 

“This wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” Miller grit out.

Ocelot could empathize. In all his careful crafting against the world, he’d had no room to protect his friend. He kept the conversation on Miller: “There was nothing you could have done.”

“Don’t just say useless things,” Miller snapped.

Ocelot smiled, despite himself. “You’re not an idiot,” he admitted.

Miller’s eyes were on John’s face again, with an expression so honest Ocelot almost couldn’t look at it.

“Idiot might be pretty close,” Miller murmured. “You were really his friend?”

“As much as anybody.”

“What about me? Is this my friend here, or did I just love what we had? The idea of him?”

Ocelot shrugged.

Miller shook his head. “We had to fight for everything we had, every bit. And we _had it_. They took what was _ours_.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

The fire returned, the anger but also something else, every flicker of it clearly visible on Miller’s too-open face. “We’re going to rebuild. We’ll take it back, and we’ll destroy anybody in our path.”

“And if he doesn’t wake up?” Ocelot asked. Are you up to that task, Kazuhira?

“It’s _ours_ ,” Miller repeated.

His faith was admirable, like a dog’s.

Ocelot opened his magazine again, entirely casual even as every fiber of him burned with the heat in Miller’s words.

Something shifted, a gear locked into place, and they worked together for nine long years.

x

“Self-hypnotism,” John repeated. His voice was a ragged croak, rubbed raw just like the rest of him. But he could sit upright in his hospital bed now, and his one eye was sharp as ever, peering straight through Ocelot in the chair beside him.

“I’m hard to train,” Ocelot said brightly. “It will be a simple procedure. Just to ensure that I stay with the double instead of running after you.”

“You would do that?”

“Of course.”

“And Kaz?” John said the name with defensiveness.

Miller was already off doing his work. He and Ocelot were in contact every day, but they rarely saw each other in person. He hadn’t been to Cyprus in years, didn’t even know that John had awakened months ago.

“You don’t have to worry about his loyalty,” Ocelot said.

That clearly wasn’t what John meant, and his eye narrowed somewhat in annoyance, but he didn’t press the issue. He’d grown harder in Ocelot’s absence after all.

“I’ll take care of everything,” Ocelot said, and John grunted.

“If you’re stuck to my double, I lose a valuable resource,” John muttered.

So that was the issue.

“You’ll find others. Always wondered what EVA was up to these days.”

John simply frowned, in that way he had that ended a conversation.

Ocelot had lied of course. Self-hypnotism was not a walk in the park.

But even as he felt pieces of himself fall away, like sloughing skin, he could never erase that name whispering in his head. He tried to. It stayed firm: Kazuhira.

It figured the one thing to hold his remaining pieces together would be the lie of someone else entirely.

Their calls were usually brief, rattling off information, but something in the tired, quiet murmur of Miller’s updates every night was intimate. They called each other when they were alone, in their respective offices or tents or makeshift quarters. In a strange way, their respective partner was the only one allowed into these spaces. A familiar voice from countries away.


End file.
